It's said that when John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence, he joked, "There! Now the king can read that without his spectacles." Since 1776, Hancock's name has been synonymous with large writing, but America's gotten a lot bigger since then, and so has our writing. A five-inch signature just isn't enough anymore. Today, if you want to put your name on the map, you can literally put your name on the map.

Everything's bigger in Texas.

Jimmie Luecke was a young Texas state trooper who left the highway patrol in 1980 to try his hand at oil drilling. The Austin chalk oil boom made him a millionaire, and so he bought some land outside Smithville, Texas and settled down to raise cattle. In the late '90s, while clearing new grazing land on his ranch, Luecke decided on a Texas-sized display of ego. As he bulldozed up the brush, he left behind the word LUECKE in neat kilometer-tall letters. It was the biggest signature in human history.

NASA calibrates its instruments to Luecke's autograph.

The Luecke ranch lies directly along major flight paths, including most westbound flights out of Houston, so the giant name quickly became a landmark for commercial pilots. Luecke has been criticized online for clear-cutting so many acres of Lost Pines Forest, an isolated belt of loblolly pines that's unique in Texas. But at least he has some admirers at NASA. Luecke's "handwriting" is so precise that in 2003, NASA scientists were able to use the 2.5-mile-long name "for evaluating spatial resolution of astronaut photographs."

A disastrous brush fire threatens Luecke's good name.

In October 2015, a wildfire swept across the dry grass of Bastrop County, burning 4,582 acres and 64 homes. The Hidden Pines fire left the "Luecke" trees untouched, but investigators determined that it was a spark under one of the Luecke ranch's tractors that started the blaze. Luecke's attorneys says that the family isn't liable for the accidental damage, but 22 families who lost their homes disagree, and have filed suit.

Arab oil money challenges Texas oil money on the map.

For seven years, Luecke had a rival: Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, the flamboyant Emirati billionaire known as "the Rainbow Sheikh." Among Hamad's many eccentricities, he owns a custom globe-shaped motor home painted to resemble the Earth—but at exactly one-millionth scale! But in 2005, he took his apparent geo-geekery to a whole new level by carving his name in the sand of Al Futaisi island, off Abu Dhabi. The two-mile-long signature was made of connected canals that would fill with water when tides rose in the Persian Gulf. But in 2012, Hamad apparently bored of his billboard-for-aliens, and had it erased. Jimmie Luecke is once again the graffiti champ of planet Earth.

Explore the world's oddities every week with Ken Jennings, and check out his book Maphead for more geography trivia.